PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says it is too soon for Trinidad and To­ba­go to think about life af­ter the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, not­ing the coun­try’s fo­cus right now has to re­main on flat­ten­ing the curve.

“Let’s pre­tend we are fight­ing a war. In any war, there must be an ex­it strat­e­gy, but it is too soon to talk about that. If we talk about that, the pop­u­la­tion may be lulled in­to a sense, you know, this thing is com­ing to an end.

“Let us start to con­gre­gate. Let us start to do this, let us start to go back to nor­mal,” said Deyals­ingh dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Min­istry of Health press brief­ing.

“We want to keep the pres­sure on. We want to keep the lid on this thing. And again the on­ly thing we want to fo­cus on, the on­ly mes­sage we need to push is this: Stay home.”

Head of OBG­YN for the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal Dr Sal­ly-Anne Ish­mael al­so ad­dressed the con­fer­ence to clar­i­fy is­sues re­lat­ed to the po­ten­tial im­pact of COVID-19 on preg­nan­cies.

“With re­spect to the im­pact of COVID-19 on the ac­tu­al preg­nant woman, I want to re­as­sure every­one out there as well, the preg­nant woman is not ca­pa­ble of get­ting it. She is very much ca­pa­ble of get­ting it just like any­one else. She is no dif­fer­ent from the gen­er­al pub­lic in terms of con­tract­ing it,” Ish­mael said.

“It is al­so im­por­tant for her to re­alise that if she is a healthy woman, she is hav­ing a nor­mal preg­nan­cy. If she has con­tract­ed it she is more like­ly to have ab­solute­ly no symp­toms or mild symp­toms. And she is more like­ly to have a com­plete re­cov­ery.”

The doc­tor added that based on in­for­ma­tion so far there was very lit­tle risk of trans­mis­sion of the dis­ease from moth­er to child dur­ing preg­nan­cy.

“There is no ev­i­dence thus far that it has any im­pact on the de­vel­op­ment of the ba­by and there is very lit­tle sup­port­ing ev­i­dence to sug­gest that is trans­mit­ted to the ba­by dur­ing preg­nan­cy and dur­ing labour,” said Ish­mael, who al­so not­ed that breast­feed­ing af­ter child­birth was rec­om­mend­ed.

“Breast­feed­ing is ter­ri­bly im­por­tant dur­ing this time as well. It is of course one way to main­tain im­mu­ni­ty be­cause the an­ti­bod­ies are passed through breast­milk to the ba­by. There is very lit­tle ev­i­dence or no ev­i­dence thus far to sug­gest the virus is passed on in that way.”